American Monster Page 26

  They dozed off and Norma was woken by a commotion down by the tracks. She watched him sleep with one arm slung over his eyes. Charity, the Independence Day singer had said. Charity is the key. The phone beeped. Pass it on. The bioswitch hissed at her breast and the dentata bit. Dot dot dash. Game over.

  – Gene, she said, shaking him awake. It’s time.

  – For what? he mumbled.

  – We have to talk. Her voice trembled. Her tongue felt thick. I have to tell you something.

  He mumbled something she didn’t catch under the roar of engines, the howl of the train. The bamboo clattered.

  – In the morning, he said.

  – It’s time.

  – For what?

  But he turned toward the wall, and from the skylight the charred wash of dawn fell down on his hair still in the matted ponytail and his broad back, bunched with muscle, turned away from her.

  – The truth, she said, stretching out a hand in a gesture less of supplication than a final question. She brushed his warm shoulder and got her answer.

  – Spare me, he said. And fell instantly back to sleep.

  Kiphoriyo—i) n. A rare event in which an aporifek, unleashed in some obscure or unusually complex Alaxenoesis protocol, takes on an approximation of life.

  Ephatix i) n. a type or species of aporifek, unleashed in the process of Alaxenoesis, and containing both aspects of its host’s (sub) program, and the primary (meta) sequence prior to Telefraxis. In its coded quest for self-contained and sustainable replication, the Ephatix has been known to work both for and against either or both of its two ‘parent’ programs.

  (Saurum Nilea, AQn., trans. L.Shay 2666)

  51//:guy

  That, thought Norma, heading swiftly to the trailer, bits of her form strung out between the ones lost and found, is the idea. Spare him. From the truth Slash Mommy, the only game in town. But for how long? She had to know.

  It was still dark, smears of light out on the ocean, taillights and distant neon in the inky canyons of Spill City. Around the doorstep of the trailer, the small smooth scuff marks of Raye’s Vans had been overlaid by the hard curve of silver heels. Norma stomped on these with the ridged teeth of her own double soles.

  – A cunning stunt, she said out loud. I’ll find you yet, Stunt Man, and feed you to the wolves.

  She pushed open the door and closed it behind her. The trailer was empty but smelled of shampoo and beer. It was cold. Their beer cans were still on the little broken table. Norma’s closet was ransacked, the coat she’d bought for Raye gone too. She moved slowly and silently through the small space of the trailer. In the bathroom wastebasket was a small bloody parcel. The girl’s Kotex. Being a woman is an interesting life, Norma thought. On the medicine cabinet mirror were scrawled in Raye’s handwriting two words in red lipstick.

  Remember me.

  Norma’s own gaunt reflection stared back at her from behind the scrawled letters and she imagined Raye twisting around to see the strange sharp protrusions at her shoulders. The girl turning back to write herself a message, should she come back. But from where, thought Norma, and from what? Norma would have spared Raye if she could have. Should have. She opened the medicine cabinet. All the Vicodin were gone. Shame about that. She took out a wad of bandages and iodine.

  Norma numbly gathered the garbage and wrappers and cans and plastic knives and forks and chopsticks. She pulled the sleeping bag off the bed in the little alcove, and took everything—towels, shower curtain, food wrappers to burn in a trash fire along with her bloody clothes. Black plumes rose in a scrawl across the white sky, an echo of Raye’s invisible rescue message. Remember me. Norma stacked the empty water bottles and pocketed what was left of her cash and pills. She took her time. Her leg began to throb. She changed the bandages. She stood or sat for long minutes without moving. Consulted her maps. Blinked into the fading light. It was evening by the time she’d finished. Gene would be wondering where she was. Time, as always, was against her.

  She stood like a stranger in the empty trailer, no sign left of her passing but the broken table, the gouged-in walls. Against the window she conjured her and Raye’s facing silhouettes, miles soon between them. And as she stood there alone again, the contours of the sad little interior gave way and were replaced by a Whole. Norma reached her hand out to touch it, that flat-palmed gesture, not of supplication, but of asking. Where? Here on the maps were her answers. He’d said Mexico. She would make sure Gene got to Mexico. She would get a message to Jesus to make it happen, take him over the mountains himself or with someone trustworthy, as far as Coahuila or Monterrey maybe. She could see it. Gene south, and Raye to the north. There were mountains she could put between them. Her mind’s eye scanned the cruel ridges. Even a desert. A seismic chasm to keep them from returning to this fallen place. A cut difficult to cross and impossible to heal. Mommy would have to stay here in Spill City with Norma, because unlike Gene and Raye, it was where they belonged. Together.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the only one she had.

  She went back into the bathroom and rubbed off Raye’s scrawl with the sleeve of her jacket. Kept rubbing until it was all gone. Puffy with exhaustion, Norma’s newish Slash eyes looked back at her, steel gray, as cold as time. Then she turned and left the trailer for good.

  The sun was setting and the Swami’s headland threw long-fingered shadows across the sand. The sky was aflame and between the gaudy spill of cloud and the inky horizon line lay a hard white glow akin to a scrim light across the curve of the Earth. A navigational aid, she imagined, for all the Mommies out there.

  Norma did not look back. She followed the path to where the twins lay snoring beneath the oak. She nudged the girl twin’s small, cankered foot with her titanium toe. The twins woke simultaneously with a yowl, their blind slits of eyes blood orange in the reflected light.

  – Mommy! Mommy! they squealed in unison pointing to a spot just behind Norma.

  Norma instantly froze, her heart thudding like a hammer drill. The twins began to fade unevenly until they were the color of watery milk, the bark of the old pine visible through their forms. The boy twin unfurled to his feet and slowly lifted his sister to float beside him.

  – Mommymommymommy, they gibbered.

  Norma wheeled around slowly and there he was. Guy Manly. One hand on his crotch.

  Norma’s thudding heart halted for a moment, long enough for her to suspend thought, for her to take in the Guy’s pale skin, white rays of the setting sun bouncing off his silver heels. She mouthed his name, but it was drowned out by the surf.

  Guy Manly gestured toward the twins and said in a sandpaper voice, They were drowned in the Super Storm, waves came in as far as the lagoon. They screamed for their dog, so their mother went back for it, told them to wait under a tree and here they are.

  – Mommy-daddy, cried the fading children.

  – Aporafeks, said Guy. In the Nilea Tongue, as it will be translated by Lucius P Shay in the year 2656, when the Slash discovers the exo-planet in the newly named galaxy 434940.

  – I thought you’d be younger, was all Norma could manage.

  Because he was so achingly thin, the wash of scars on his cheekbones. The silver tip on his belt loose and flapping. He self-consciously straightened, puffed out his bony chest.

  – I’m as young as you feel, said Guy. Sir yes sir. He brought his hand up in a rigid digit salut.

  – Who are you?

  – Manly’s the name, Ephatix’s the game.

  He said it like a sneeze, spraying pale glots of snot in an eighteen inch radius. Pass It on.

  It? Meaning Mommy?

  – Where do you come from? Norma said. Or what?

  He gyrated his hips.

  – Ouch, he said. Not where but who, do do-do do-do do-do. Shaved her legs and then he was a she, but not entirelyleeleelee. You do-do-do-do.

  Through narrowed eyes, she watched a ray from the setting sun claw toward his jerking form. And that it had no sh
adow.

  – You’re me?

  – A shadow of your former self, he said.

  And because he spoke in nothing but clichés, like an obscene parrot, she knew it was true. Give an idiot an idiom.

  – You escaped—from me, from a part of me—back there in Bakersfield?

  – Roger that Sherlock.

  Behind them the twins giggled faintly, like a television in the next room. Canned laughter followed. Of course. He had no shadow. And she, Norma, sometimes had three.

  – Mommy, said Norma. You’re Mommy too? A double agent.

  – Caught between a cock and hard place.

  Again the feeble crotch-grab.

  – What do you want?

  – Want shmant. Cunt shunt. Jean Genie.

  She was on him in the blink of an eye. They struggled but he was weak, brittle as a pile of sticks, although she suspected he held something in reserve. His materiality surprised her, and aroused her. She felt a lick of delight beginning behind her knees. He managed to reach around and draw a battered-but-lethal-looking Bowie knife. She easily wrenched it from him and tossed it behind her. Her legs straddled his chest and he sniffed her crotch. His yellow teeth dripping goo, great globby spurts from his nose like the Crock-Pot back at the Sanctuary, the smell of rotten leeks not far behind. He howled with mirth.

  – You’re on the rag, he cackled.

  – I bleed, she said, tightening her grip on his phlegm streaked throat. Why can’t I die?

  – Memento mori, he rasped. Dream on, beyatch.

  She rammed a fist into his memento mori nose, snot and bones on her knuckles. Smashed and smashed at it just because she could.

  – What doesn’t kill me, he rasped between blows. Makes you stronger.

  And so she stopped. His yellow eyes floated in coal black seas. He coughed and expelled a gut full of bile with such force she had to turn her face away.

  – I don’t know what I ever saw in you, she said. Pushing herself to her feet.

  He lay there a while with his hat beside his head and his brassy hair tangled around two bony protrusions on his head.

  – Norma, shmorma, he tut-tutted. You saw yourself. In me.

  – You can’t die either? Ever?

  – It’s a bitch, ain’t it. He sat up, catching his breath. The ultimate rejection. I mean even death won’t have us. Whaddayagonna do?

  A piece of his nose cartilage slid into his mouth and he ate it.

  – But it makes us stronger? Trying and failing?

  He became evasive, his lying eyes filled with a kind of honey-like substance that brimmed but did not fall.

  – Wait, she said, flexing her claws. Her shoulders had begun to burn. She reached down for the Bowie knife, wiped the blade on her jeans. Wait. So some of us come back stronger, but what about you, Mr. Macho Manly? Every time death sends you back you’re, what, a little worse for wear?

  – Where? You have something that belongs to me, he said reaching for the knife.

  She lunged.

  – What do you want? he said.

  – Answers.

  – What’s the question?

  She held out a hand, helped him up, his nose all over his face. She took a few steps back, just in case. He pushed on his hat, flicked its brim and fixed her in his tarnished stare. One of his shoulders had twisted at an odd angle that not even his cowhide jacket could conceal and his left arm swung flaccidly across his sunken belly. He reached down furtively with his good hand to gather a scattered deck of Harry Potter playing cards which he crammed back into his pocket.

  – How much time do I have?

  – That depends, said Guy, squaring off the deck.

  – On what?

  – What do you think?

  – On Mommy. Is the question. The only question.

  – So ditch the bitch already, he snarled.

  – I tried that. Tore at my guts. Tried to cut off the umbilicus.

  – Ouch.

  – Is right. And then I tried to drown myself. Kill us both. But you already know that.

  – You came back stronger, he said. Mommy did too. It’s in you. Forevermore. In your hole.

  He chortled, a sound halfway between a dishwasher and a death rattle.

  – The dentata? What then? she said. Tell me how to ditch the bitch, fucker, or its slice-and-dice time.

  – It won’t work for you.

  – Liar, she said, slashing a diagonal backslash across his chest. Black ooze like the mark of a broken Zorro.

  He looked down at the slash across his body. Touched the dark matter with a shaky hand.

  – I got that David Bowie off some ear-slicing psycho in Bakersfield. Well not from him directly, but from some meth head who found it washed up on the shore couple years later, was using it to cut the tails and tongues off cats. Plenty more sick fish in the sea, darlin’, where that came from.

  Norma looked up at the dripping blade that looked aflame, the scratched wooden handle with its mismatched rivets.

  – Not your darling, she said.

  Guy Manly turned and took a step toward her. She slashed. He took a step back.

  – I don’t know about the Grimey. Last I saw Mac Daddy was taking care of her.

  He gave a scratchy snicker.

  – Why’d you rip him off? Take that stupid letter he loved so much.

  – The one from whatsisname Quilty?

  – Blanket.

  He made a pretense of thinking about it. Um. It’s in my program. I’m a, let me think. I’m um. Your worst nightmare? Does that sound about right?

  – The barn, said Norma. The one I go to in my dreams. You’re there. I see your prints in the sawdust. Decapitated heads. Men’s parts. You a collector of souls or something?

  Guy said, Or something. It’s good to have a hobby. Makes you live longer.

  – And I see the barn through your eyes.

  He brushed down his jacket with mock patience. More than that, he said. A part of you goes there. With me.

  – Because you’re my nightmare. She hesitated but had to say it, We’re in some kind of partnership.

  – Think of me, he said releasing a wet and foul fart, as the wind beneath your wings.

  She pulled her jacket collar over her nose. She’d heard about telomeric runoff and mnemonic waste unleashed in repeat transformations. No wonder it stank. The twins shrieked from somewhere in the tree.

  Whoever thunk it stunk it, called out the boy twin.

  – Whoever deduced it produced it, said Guy turning his empty eyes up at the branches.

  Whoever denied it supplied it, said the girl twin’s voice, sweet and clear and very faint.

  – He who articulated it particulated it, hissed Guy. Gimme my knife, bitch.

  – Keep talking, said Norma.

  – Whoever smelt it, said Guy, trying and failing to shuffle the Harry Potter deck.

  – Dealt it, said Norma. Shit. Human evil, I sniff it out. You deal with it.

  – I’m all that’s left of the mission as originally conceived.

  Norma brought her nose out from behind her collar and sniffed the clean sea air beneath the receding stench. Which isn’t much, she said. Just saying.

  – It’s enough. You’ve been to the barn. There’s only one of me now. Now that you’re changed. I mean you’re still a hunter. There’s that. Mommy’s still got that up its sleeve.

  He stuck out a black tongue and wagged it at her.

  She made another slash across his chest. Two backslashes. He wobbled, weakening.

  – Changed? How?

  – The wings, the vengeance. Wasn’t in your program. You picked that up somewhere along the way.

  San Miguel.

  – Very very bad. Mommy’s mad. Very mad. You’re in trouble. Big big—

  She lunged again, but just for show. He recoiled, thrust his groin at her.

  – You started off as a horn hunter, he said. Cocks. Shlongs, wangs.

  – I get it. Why?

  He
drew his misshapen hands together in mock piety.

  – You heard. Mommmymommymommmy. It thinks a man’s dick’s in his brain.

  Norma said, What’s with that?

  Her bowel spasmed and her pulse glugged in her ears. Ice burned across her skin. All of her human senses vied with each other and with the other ones, the extending claws wracking her bones, the tusks rending her flesh, blood flowing between her fingers.

  Guy Manly did another little nervous dance, his eyes on Norma’s claws and the flashing Bowie knife.

  – I mean all this—Norma swept the knife out hopelessly. You and me. All this, for a horn.

  – Not just any horn, said Guy warily. The horn. The One Horn. The Best One. The one attached to a brain with farthest to fall.

  Norma locked her eyes on him. Why? Exactly why?

  Guy shrugged, Because it can. Because once it uploads itself into the horn, it starts to replicate and then it’s home and host.

  – Over my dead body, which according to you is never, or near enough.

  – Plenty more fish in the sea, said Guy with a shrug that seemed to wrack him from limb to limb.

  – Not like him.

  – Okay. Not plenty. Well. A few. One or two. A hard man is good to find. I’ll grant you that. But that’s what you’re programmed to do. To find the best brains around and fuck with them. You’ll implant one of those suckers and then it’s Mommy-time! That was Mommy’s Plan A. It programmed you to be a badass, literally, drawn to all that’s good, and ruin it. And then Mommy could wander among the wreckage, a whole new world to rule.

  – Why?

  Guy shrugged, It’s a rush. To corrupt the incorruptible.

  – But something else happened. My program was the one corrupted.

  Guy hitched up his jeans.

  – Even if it had one, which it doesn’t, Mommy wouldn’t know its ass from its elbow. Wrong schlong, hehe. It can’t even write a program without clichés and rhymes. It can’t understand what it is to be Slash—human. It can’t even imagine—even on the most basic level, which is language. I mean look at me. But it knows good gray matter when it finds it. Or when you find it. Or when it finds you—